Finding poetry in the mud of Flanders

By PETER LEWIS

Last updated at 14:29 11 March 2008

Another book on World War I? Yes, and there are already 900 more. There have been previous eyewitness collections like this from the archives of diaries, letters home or interviews with those who endured the Western Front.

But this one is special. It may be the selection Brian MacArthur has unerringly made.

There is nothing here that is not memorably written. It may be the unexpectedness of the details. But altogether it is a book that knocks you sideways.

Some of it is hard to read without shuddering yet being compelled to read on. Much of it is also impossible to read without a feeling of astonished humility before so much proof of the unquenchable spirit of humanity, where you would expect only hatred.

You wonder how they stood it. You wonder even more how they managed to keep kindness and comradeship alive amid so much waste.

That overwhelming World War I feeling I have never felt more strongly than in this book: the sickening waste and futility of it all. It was my father's war — perhaps your grandfather's or great-uncle's — not ours.

But it still haunts us all every November.

As it should.

It was a war that made men write poetry. They are all here, the wellknown names. Rupert Brooke's exultation at being called to fight soon gave way to the disillusion and disgust of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

But ordinary soldiers were moved to write poetry too, and good poetry, often in memory of a best friend gone. 'I have a rendezvous with death,' wrote one subaltern presciently on the eve of the Somme.

Another ended a poem called Before Action with 'Help Me To Die, O Lord'. Afterwards,

Kipling put all the despair of waiting for news of his missing son into the poem My Boy Jack.

Besides the poetry there were the lyrics, the grimly upbeat lines of the popular songs altered by coarsened and beleaguered soldiers. 'If You Were The Only Boche In The Trench' and 'When This Bloody War is Over' were sung to the hymn What A Friend We Have In Jesus; in place of They'll Never Believe Me they sang, 'And when they ask us how dangerous it was — oh, we'll never tell them'. Which most of them didn't.

Here you can experience the whitehot moment of the retreat from Mons, the disaster of Loos, the massacre of the Somme. The bombardment before the attack is brilliantly described by the historian R.H. Tawney: 'It was not a noise, it was a symphony.' And J.R. Ackerley writes of the 'jibbering imbecility' to which it was expected to reduce the Germans. 'Instead, their smartest snipers and machine-gunners were coolly waiting for us.' Having lost more men in a day than any army in history, the British High Command also lost any confidence the troops might once have had in its leadership. This is a persistent theme: the blind complacency of British regular officers.

The essayist C.E. Montague attributes it to their schooling, with total emphasis on games and the attitude that doing work, especially brain work, was 'bad form' when you could be playing polo. On the eve of the Somme a captain actually produced five footballs and offered a prize to the platoon which first dribbled theirs across No Man's Land.

Class distinction gave the officers their easily recognisable uniforms and pistols instead of rifles, which made them a target for the German gunners to pick off first, as they were taught to.

'The British High Command are nothing but a lot of mugs with titles and no brains,' wrote an exasperated South African private.

Australian Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert) sent a damning report on the 'ghastly bungling' at Gallipoli to the Prime Minister: 'The conceit and complacency of the general staff is only equalled by their incapacity.' Lloyd George read it and sacked the commanding general.

Field Marshal Sir John French, one of our most inept commanders, wrote with spluttering indignation of the unsporting and unworthy weapon of gas. In reply General Haig used gas too — and it blew back over the British lines.

Troops had no protection against it for months except a body belt soaked in water and held over the nose and mouth, which didn't help much. 'We choked, spit and coughed, our lungs felt they were being burnt out. We lay with our noses in the mud fighting for breath, longing to run.' German soldiers suffered the same miseries as the British. You have to look twice to see whether you are reading a British or a German account of them. The Christmas truce in 1914 lasted until New Year's Eve.

'The men exchanged cigarettes, tinned meat and photographs with us and said they didn't want to shoot any more. They said they had had enough of lying in wet trenches. They really are much dirtier than we are and are more sick.' So wrote a German soldier. No wonder the high commands couldn't wait to put a stop to this.

Men were kept at it by fearsome discipline, shootings at dawn and 'Number One Field Punishment' which meant being tied spread-eagled to a carriage wheel as in a crucifixion, for being late on parade.

Nevertheless there were times of mutiny against bullying Red Caps and for months almost half the French army refused to fight.

There are unforgettable moments in this book: the first tanks ('they eat up houses!') walking right over German trenches; the artist Paul Nash's painting of No Man's Land — 'the ground was not mud but an octopus of sucking clay' he said; a man sliced in two by a shell whose lower half went on running; the pieces of lung coughed up by frothing and gurgling men with blackened faces … I will stop there. Get it and see for yourself.